Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,162 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Hooligan Sparrow
Lowest review score: 0 Followers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,708 out of 11162
  2. Mixed: 4,553 out of 11162
  3. Negative: 1,901 out of 11162
11162 movie reviews
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    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Die, Mommie, Die!
    Though Natasha Lyonne as bratty daughter and Philip Baker Hall as the disposable spouse impress, it's Busch's heartfelt Joan Crawford homage that enthralls. Busch can transcend even the smog, making hazy camp seem fresh.
  2. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    Many filmmakers have tried in recent years, but few have nailed the elusive formula of the two-hander romantic comedy quite like Emily Ting with Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong.
  3. Too Late
    Like the hardboiled detectives of yore, Too Late ultimately gets the job done — even if it's in its own off-the-books way.
  4. The Treatment
    Short, sweet, and hardly ever cloying, The Treatment is largely dependent for its success on the quality of its performances--most surprisingly, Eigeman's.
  5. All the Wilderness
    In spite of the tatty "coming of age" familiarity, Johnson's vision seems fresh and vibrant.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Etc.
    As cutely contrived as any scripted Hollywood romance.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Everything's Cool
    Gratingly condescending toward its audience and sorely lacking in any substantive information about the problem or the solution.
  8. Down the Shore
    The saddest part of this movie that oh-so-wants you to know it is sad is that Jennings sets up a pretty interesting dynamic, then bails on telling a story.
  9. Toad Road
    Though far from perfect, Toad Road is also the first unique horror film to come along in years.
  10. Kid Cannabis
    Kid Cannabis presents its material not as cautionary tale but as celebratory fantasy — which, like Nate's mom turning a blind eye to her son's illegal operation, seems to be the by-product of either inanity or excessive THC.
  11. Hamlet 2
    Not nearly as uproarious as it should be.
  12. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    It's the latest installment in what now forms a lightly likable trilogy of films based on Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid books.
  13. Bruno
    Funny as it is, Brüno could not be as shockingly uproarious as "Borat." No matter how well retold, a joke necessarily loses explosive force the second time around. But a great gag is a thing of beauty forever--so, too, a comic performance.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amu
    Too bad first-time writer-director Shonali Bose's juxtaposition of the personal and the political often feels forced, and like many didactic history lessons, this one's about 20 minutes too long.
  15. The Tracey Fragments
    Beyond its overarching aesthetic, The Tracey Fragments co-stars Toronto rockabilly punk Slim Twig as a Tim Burton caricature of Pretty in Pink’s Duckie and boasts a score by Broken Social Scene; it would all swagger dangerously close into hipster-trash territory if not for Page's pathos and wit, honest to blog.
  16. The Big Uneasy
    Shearer builds an airtight case to prove his thesis, and one of his most chilling arguments is a roll call of brave souls whose lives and careers have been systematically wrecked in pursuit of the truth.
  17. When Animals Dream
    Avoiding the genre's typical werewolfism-as-puberty metaphors, director Jonas Alexander Arnby instead casts his material as a drawn-out character study — the problem being that his characters are all one-note dullards, which turns his slow, portent-heavy drama into a giant slog.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Uncle Kent 2
    Uncle Kent 2 is an even more rambling ball of nonsense than the original, which at least had its feet planted in reality.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Puccini for Beginners
    Maggenti suffocates her story with dated references to every buzzword from Laura Mulvey's feminist catalog except for "the male gaze." In short, a nightmare worse than "Trust the Man."
  20. Get Smart
    This redux is a rare device: a TV remake for the big screen that works on its own terms.
  21. Dear Mr. Watterson
    [A] heartfelt but largely inarticulate documentary.
  22. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    The film's mishmash of news footage and concert reviews threatens to devolve into a CSNY wank-fest.
  23. The Château
    The raw art of the malapropism has rarely been so extensively honored, but the increasingly strident, slapstick-smacked movie runs out of steam once the culture shock wears off.
  24. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause
    What seems like a nut-on-a-bar-stool rant morphs into a triumphal evocation of the emotional-political bluster of that time.
  25. Julien Donkey-Boy
    A handheld and grainy exercise in cine-stupefaction...too spastic to connect...the movie just flails the air.
  26. Return to Me
    First-time director Bonnie Hunt pays slavish adherence to the Nora Ephron rules of assembly for the prefab rom-com.
  27. Chuen jik sat sau
    There's plenty to enjoy -- in no small part thanks to Lau.
  28. From Hell
    Superbly shot around Prague -- From Hell is even more stylish than gruesome -- it has the lush decrepitude of an autumn compost heap or an old Hammer werewolf flick.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Get Frank
    Let's Get Frank is hardly frank enough.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Bread, My Sweet
    There's little meaty -- and nothing glandular -- in the slight weepie The Bread, My Sweet.
  31. LBJ
    LBJ slips from an examination of a sometimes admirable leader into a hagiographic daydream, a fantasy of a father figure to save us all. That’s a matter of Reiner’s politics, of course, but even more so a matter of his instincts as a popular filmmaker: He’s offering us an American presidency to escape to.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Whole New Thing
    Half-new at most, this "Running With Scissors"–type tale of a precocious, effeminate teen who gets hot for teacher while prepping for a life in the arts isn't evidently autobiographical. Neither is it funny--or poignant or insightful or remotely worth one's time.
  33. The First Purge
    The First Purge actually pulls back somewhat on that sense of bloodthirsty anticipation. The violence here feels more tragic than ever, and it’s also some time coming; when Purge Night does start, the killing doesn’t begin immediately.
  34. Fierce People
    Whereas most of the injustices suffered by "Nanny's" nanny are of the skin-deep variety, the hopelessly reductive Fierce People ups the ante.
  35. Cymbeline
    This Cymbeline is brash and inventive and more than a little wild. Perhaps we've been wrong about this play all along.
  36. The Misfortunates
    Often very funny, and the rolling remember-when vignettes trump the typical low-country wild-hairy-man sideshows.
  37. Fairhaven
    Messina's performance has a lived-in, emotional messiness, but the film is nothing but clichés.
  38. Entanglement
    Ben’s carefully plotted healing diminishes the complexity of mental illness, and gives James’s sweet vision a bitter aftertaste. Filiatrault uses too-neat bookending in the place of dramatic resolution, so that the story of a man hanging on by a thread is nicely tied up in a bow.
  39. What We Did on Our Holiday
    Jones and Connolly have terrific chemistry, particularly as Lottie works through the fact that adults encourage dishonesty and lying when it suits their own needs, and that secrets are more pervasive than openness.
  40. Clip
    Milos's film pulses with f#*!-it-all abandon and chintzy eastern-Euro club beats.
  41. The Discovery
    While the film is ambitious, with enough intrigue and uneasy moral quandaries to keep my attention rapt in the end it just doesn’t make the leap to the other side.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bobby
    Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is--an "Airport" movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Decent Factory
    A Decent Factory is just as much about the motives of the people asking the questions as those of the people avoiding the answers.
  44. The Forgotten Space
    Epic in scope, intellectual agility, and the potential to induce panic and despair, this documentary exploration of global trade as an emblem of economic apocalypse avoids (just barely) doom-mongering by virtue of its compassion and visual grandeur.
  45. Redlegs
    The trio's mourning feels more like immature self-absorption.
  46. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    While it has its moments, Miguel Arteta's comedy relies too much on gender-shaming and emasculation jokes.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Exterminating Angels
    One audaciously, endearingly ludicrous movie.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Portraits chinois
    The performances are uniformly strong.
  49. Freeze Me
    Ishii's rough-hewn film may be the nastiest entry in its dubious but resonant subgenre since "I Spit on Your Grave." It's a black pearl for anyone who likes a little existential psychosis with their semi-softcore exploitation.
  50. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    Comfortably familiar. It lacks the tension between grandeur and intimacy that characterizes the films it apes.
  51. Malèna
    A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    An Adolescent
    Although the movie drags, Okuda (who also directed) makes for a gloriously bad lieutenant, while Ozawa is enjoyably discomfiting in her unblushing carnality.
  53. Paper Heart
    A documentary except when it's a mockumentary, this is all kinds of adorable and heartbreaking--the doc part, at least.
  54. Dare
    Zach Gilford's game performance is still no match for the film's catalog of easy ironies, awkward framings, and advice on how to play Blanche DuBois.
  55. Desert Flower
    Luckily, her cast makes up for the lapses, and Kebede is especially effective at showing how triumph over culturally sanctioned brutality remains a tentative prospect at best.
  56. Oblivion
    The good news: Here's a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance against grandeur...Which brings us to Tom Cruise, the not-necessarily-good news. However engaging its end-times mysteries, Oblivion is still a Tom Cruise movie.
  57. The Girl
    Hernandez is soulful and affecting, though, and Cornish embodies Ashley's self-centered character with nuance and subtlety.
  58. The Berlin File
    The Berlin File keeps narrative coherence far down on a priority list that privileges expertly choreographed hand-to-hand combat, hair-raising stunt work...and such familiar genre accoutrements as secret rooms hidden behind bookshelves, shiny metallic attaché cases, and pens concealing fast-acting vials of poison.
  59. The ROMEOWS
    Artistry isn't the business of this film, and neither, to any great extent, is grasping the details of the anecdotes these men tell; like any meal, it's the flavor that matters.
  60. Rock in the Red Zone
    Bialis's growing immersion in the town is poignant, even admirable.
  61. The Skyjacker's Tale
    Canadian documentarian Jamie Kastner (The Secret Disco Revolution) has crafted an entertainingly kitschy version of an Errol Morris film.
  62. A Little Help
    The film is as average and forgettable.
  63. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Narrative's beside the point in a movie created by two guys who gorge on pop culture's high-fat diet and regurgitate it into something approaching . . . art? Close enough.
  64. Draft Day
    This isn't so much a movie about sports as it is a riff on politics in the broad sense of the word, and the ways in which smart, insightful people play along to get along -- and then change the game for the better by following their gut.
  65. Camp X-Ray
    For much of its running time, Camp X-Ray stands as the fullest on-screen imaginative treatment of two of the defining developments of the last 15 years of American life: the deployment of women in our volunteer army, and the indefinite detention of men we think, but can't quite prove, deserve it.
  66. Downtown 81
    Doesn't dawdle and, despite some eye-rolling dialogue, is a generally amiable time-trip.
  67. American Made Movie
    The film's experts and entrepreneurs have a lot to say worth listening to, but little that illuminates any clear path.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dance Party, USA
    Writer-director Aaron Katz has a gift for naturalistic dialogue--that alone allows his film to transcend the micro-budget indie gabfest genre. On the other hand, there's a fine line between naturalistic and dull, and Dance Party occasionally crosses it as its young actors talk about life, or don't talk about life.
  69. Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    The biggest surprise: Older, un-messianic, and mostly eschewing cute stunts, Moore somehow makes his one-man show seem almost humble. It plays less like "I'm still here!" attention-seeking than it does a concerned citizen's act of hope.
  70. You've Been Trumped Too
    If you don't know who to vote for by now, whatever you do, don't see this movie. It's only going to tell you bad things. We're having fun here, right?
  71. Music of the Heart
    Solid raw material, but the execution is overcooked.
  72. Gerry
    Exercise in existential tedium that it is, Gerry isn't without devotees.
  73. Freak Show
    [A] bitterly funny and warmly empathetic first feature.
  74. Observe and Report
    Broad but thin and more bleak than uproarious--a humorously downsized homage to foundational '70s classics like "Dirty Harry" and, especially, "Taxi Driver."
  75. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    This is primarily a film for fans of all involved.
  76. Until the Light Takes Us
    One artist favorably compares the homemade metal scene to state-supported "mediocre cultural activity"--as good a designation as any for Until the Light Takes Us.
  77. Wah Do Dem
    Methinks we're meant to actually feel sorry for this overprivileged twerp in neon sunglasses.
  78. The Freebie
    None of the dialogue, presumably arrived at through improvisation, is either funny or memorable.
  79. The Magnificent Seven
    You get enough of a sense of this place and these men — and that widow! — that it's a disappointment when, in the end, we just have to watch it all blow to hell.
  80. The Taste of Money
    Is there such a thing as "tastefully smutty"? Director Im Sang-soo's moody and semi-Shakespearian The Taste of Money walks that line with some artfully lit humping and cross-generational seduction.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    With Friends Like These...
    Messina's characters gripe at being typecast as goombah hit men, yet the director seems blissfully unaware that he dooms them to the very fate they protest by painting them with such prosaic, uninspired strokes. (review of re-release)
  82. Elizabeth Harvest
    Gutierrez works some twists on the familiar premise, and one standout thrill of a chase scene employs Brian De Palma’s signature split screens. But as it nears the two-hour mark, the film becomes exhausting, shedding very little light on the futuristic implications of the story.
  83. Small Time
    The film isn't without mirth and charm... But as Surnow steers into serious waters, the direction of the storytelling becomes increasingly misguided.
  84. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    A mockumentary that exhausts its best joke with its premise.
  85. Rock Star
    Raking over the same clichés as "Almost Famous," Rock Star is far less reverential -- it isn't burdened by generational nostalgia and doesn't take itself too seriously.
  86. What We Do Is Secret
    The worst kind of bastard adaptation, Secret subtracts without adding.
  87. Illegal
    Blunt, loud, and showboaty, Illegal suffers even more when compared with another recent Liège-set film about the horrors faced by paperless immigrants: the Dardennes' "Lorna's Silence."
  88. Spork
    Writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr. shoehorns the character into a witlessly stitched homage to other films - notably "Heathers."
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    It's silly and excessive, but Fullmetal Alchemist occasionally strikes a note of adolescent truth, as when Ed wishes for "some way to get our bodies back."
  90. Mulberry Child
    A documentary -- based in part on Jian Ping's autobiographical book of the same name -- whose poignancy is lessened by its awkward formal devices.
  91. Flex Is Kings
    The film is more an on-the-fly glimpse of the scene than a deep-dive exploration, but that doesn't make it any less electric.
  92. Closer to God
    The drama plays out as expected — the ending, particularly, seems too pat — but offers several well-executed moments of tension along the way.
  93. Blame
    Quinn Shephard’s directorial debut, Blame, leans heavily on this persistent despair, yes, but also leverages it in innovative and occasionally startling ways.
  94. Strangers on the Earth
    Pilgrimages have potential: Geoffrey Chaucer gave us 24 good yarns in his Canterbury Tales. But there isn’t even one in the otherwise gorgeous documentary Strangers on the Earth.
  95. Assault on Precinct 13
    A surprisingly credible action flick.
  96. The Signal
    The persuasive power of individual moments suggests that director William Eubank has a bright future — and could push himself harder when writing his scripts.
  97. Because of Winn-Dixie
    The story seems awkwardly positioned between coming-of-age realism and whimsical fantasy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vacancy
    Antal smartly adheres to the no-frills demands of B-movie horror, eliciting impressive chills from old-fashioned suffocating dread rather than the now usual gore. And Wilson and Beckinsale superbly execute everything that's required of their characters--namely, yelling and running.
  99. Felt
    This strange, quiet film takes social narratives about romance and gender and upends them, often seeming like one thing until it's another.
  100. Swim Little Fish Swim
    The performances often enliven the stale material... But the script's naïveté is galling.
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